That the attack was not in fact terrorism – not instigation of terror among the population for political ends – probably makes no difference to the grief felt by those whose loved ones were killed. However, it does make a difference to the appropriate policy response. A society with too many unhappy or angry people, needs different solutions to one in which violence is being used as a political tactic.

This attacker was described originally as a ‘lone wolf’, a fairly ordinary person who is seen as socially unsuccessful who is suddenly radicalised. Frank Furedi, a sociologist who has studied terrorism, points out that people who kills those in their own society, such as the shootings in Norway in 2011, “raise fundamental questions about the integrity of the communities that they inhabit…. That they choose to be radicalised into a worldview that is hostile to the values of their society is not experienced simply as an act of betrayal, but as an indictment of society’s failure to give meaning to people’s lives. So the phenomenon of the lone wolf speaks not just to the isolation of these individuals, but also to the relative weakness of the values that are supposed to bind society together.”